Executive Summary

A Plan for Moving Toward Metro’s Mission and Vision

This Strategic Plan for Public Transportation directs Metro to work toward its mission and vision. This Strategic Plan was developed in the context of specific opportunities and challenges facing King County residents. The Strategic Plan establishes 10 goals, along with objectives, outcomes, and strategies to achieve them and measures to track progress.

Provide the best possible public transportation services and improve regional mobility and quality of life in King County.

Vision

Metro will advance its mission by delivering a regional, innovative, and integrated mobility network that is safe, equitable, and sustainable. This network will help Metro contribute to healthy communities, a thriving economy, and a sustainable

environment. Metro plans to do this by building towards its long-range plan, Metro Connects, bringing more and better mobility services to King County over the next 30 years. Metro will grow in alignment with its core values, use data to inform decisions, modernize the system, and engage with customers and the community to ensure the future system meets people’s needs and prioritizes investments where needs are greatest.

Opportunities and Challenges

A growing, diversifying population and historic inequities: King County expects more than 870,000 more people and 680,000 new jobs by 2050. 1 King County is also becoming more diverse and, despite having some of the most prosperous communities in the world, there are deeply entrenched social, economic, and environmental inequities based on race, place, and income. These inequities hold back those within affected communities and threaten King County’s collective prosperity. Transportation challenges resulting from displacement: Data shows that many households in King County that have low incomes are being displaced from densely populated and expensive areas, such as Seattle. They are moving into areas that are more affordable, such as communities in south King County. Race also factors into such displacement. People who have been displaced often face longer and more challenging journeys to get to work, school, or other opportunities. The worsening climate crisis: In King County and globally, climate change is affecting the environment, economy, and human health.2 The overall transportation sector generates more than one-third of climate-altering greenhouse gas emissions in King County. Public transit fleet generates less than one percent of countywide greenhouse gas emissions. Priority populations3 tend to bear a disproportionate burden of the impacts of climate change.4

The need to integrate a wide range of mobility services, including

connecting with regional transportation partners: High-capacity bus and rail service will remain the backbone of the regional mobility system. However, new technologies and new types of services—including on-demand services—are enabling a wider range of mobility options. These innovative services complement the fixedroute system and connect many more people to transit, including those for whom fixed-route service does not meet community needs and/or is not cost-effective, and broadens the destinations available to residents. Additionally, Metro’s regional

1 Puget Sound Regional Council VISION 2050 growth projections (technically 872,000 people, 682,000 jobs from 2017-2050) 2 Snover, A.K. et al., No Time to Waste: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C and Implications for Washington State, a briefing paper by the Climate Impacts Group. University of Washington, Seattle, 2019. Available at: https://cig.uw.edu/resources/special-reports/no-time-to-waste/ 3 As defined in the Mobility Framework, priority populations include people who have low or no income; are Black, Indigenous, or other people of color; are immigrants or refugees; have disabilities; or are linguistically diverse. 4 University of Washington Climate Impacts Group, Department of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences, An Unfair Share: Exploring the disproportionate risks from climate change facing Washington state communities. University of Washington, Seattle, 2018. Available at: https://cig.uw.edu/ourwork/applied-research/an-unfair-share-report/

transportation partners will continue to grow and update their systems, including expanding light rail. The COVID-19 pandemic: The Puget Sound region was home to the United States’ first confirmed case of COVID-19, requiring Metro to quickly make sweeping changes to keep riders and employees safe, adjust service, partner creatively, and wisely steward financial resources during the subsequent economic downturn. Looking ahead, there remains sizable uncertainties related to the Puget Sound region’s recovery from COVID-19, its economic impacts, and the racial and social disparities it exposed. The need for new, sustainable funding sources: Metro’s existing revenue structure relies heavily on sales tax—a volatile and regressive revenue source. Transit demand exceeds Metro’s funding capacity, and the gap will increase as Metro seeks to build toward the 2050 service network envisioned in Metro Connects. Metro also must recover from the economic and ridership impacts of COVID-19.

Strategic Plan Goals

 Invest upstream and where needs are greatest.  Address the climate crisis and environmental justice.  Innovate to improve mobility, complement transit, and advance equity and sustainability.  Keep passengers, employees, and communities safe.  Support thriving, equitable, transit-oriented communities that foster economic development.  Improve access to mobility options.  Provide fast, reliable, and integrated mobility services.  Build a skilled, diverse, and well-supported workforce that has opportunities to grow.  Be responsible stewards of financial resources and invest in line with values and goals.  Conduct deliberate and transparent community engagement. Outcomes, objectives, strategies, and performance measures for each of these goals are summarized in Table 1, “Summary Table of Metro Strategic Plan Elements”. Despite the changes and challenges facing King County, Metro’s mission, vision, and belief that mobility is a human right have not changed. Metro is committed to working closely with communities, other transit providers, jurisdictions, employers, community-based organizations, and others to build a mobility agency that allows everyone an opportunity to thrive.

Pathway to the Future

This Strategic Plan, together with Metro Connects, addresses the aforementioned challenges and opportunities and moves Metro toward its vision for regional mobility. Metro Connects, Metro’s adopted long-term plan for service and capital growth by 2050, contains more detail about Metro’s future mobility network. Metro will continue

growing and improving its services, including bus, vanpool, flexible services, Access Paratransit, and water taxi. Metro’s Strategic Plan builds on King County’s mission, vision, guiding principles, and goals, which were adopted in 2010 and updated in 2015 and 2021. The revised County goals highlight the importance of transportation by adding a new goal: Deliver a seamless, reliable network of transportation options to get people where they need to go, when they need to get there. Metro's Strategic Plan reflects the recommendations of several advisory groups:  The Equity Cabinet, which co-created the Mobility Framework, directed Metro to center advancing equity and addressing climate change and worked with Metro to update its policies in 2019-2021. Implementing the Mobility Framework Metro systemically provided resource support to communitybased organizations and individuals to leverage their expertise toward advancing equity and social justice outcomes.  The Regional Transit Task Force proposed a groundbreaking new policy framework and service guidelines in 2010. The Mobility Framework articulates a vision for a regional mobility system that is innovative, integrated, equitable, and sustainable. In this Strategic Plan, Metro describes a vision for a regional, integrated, and innovative system of mobility that is equitable, sustainable, and safe. The Mobility Framework includes guiding principles and recommendations for achieving that vision and was informed by changing demographics, travel trends and needs, best practices, emerging mobility technologies, and public input in partnership with the Equity Cabinet. The Strategic Plan goals reflect the sentiment of the Mobility Framework guiding principles, developed with the Equity Cabinet, and themes from the goals in the previous version of the Strategic Plan. In response to stakeholder input, the goals are intentionally not numbered to avoid implying priority order. They are listed in the order of the adopted Mobility Framework guiding principles. The updated Strategic Plan also aligns with King County’s Strategic Climate Action Plan and its Strategic Plan for Equity and Social Justice. The Strategic Plan takes a “targeted universalism” approach consistent with King County’s Equity and Social Justice Strategic Plan, which defines targeted universalism as “defining outcomes for all, identifying obstacles faced by specific groups, and tailoring strategies and building on assets to address barriers.”5 Metro’s universal outcomes are captured in its mission to “provide the best possible public transportation services and improve regional mobility and quality of like in King County” and vision to “deliver a regional, innovative, and integrated mobility network that is safe, equitable, and sustainable.” The plan outlines how Metro will develop and enact targeted approaches and investments with and for communities with the greatest needs—priority populations. By making investments tailored to community needs, Metro can improve mobility and thereby priority populations’ access to the determinants of equity.

5 King County Equity and Social Justice Strategic Plan

Priority populations: people who are Black, Indigenous, and of color; have lowor no-income; are immigrants or refugees; have disabilities; or are linguistically diverse. Metro defined which populations to focus on in partnership with the King County Office of Equity and Social Justice and the Equity Cabinet as part of the development of the adopted Mobility Framework.

Performance Measurement and Continuous Improvement

This Strategic Plan sets performance measures to track progress towards the key outcomes for each of the ten goals, which will be displayed in an interactive, webbased dashboard. This dashboard will also illustrate progress towards Metro Connects. Sharing data like this will help increase transparency with the staff, the public, elected officials, and other stakeholders. There may be slight variations in phrasing and language between the dashboard and this Strategic Plan to ensure the public facing dashboard uses plain language that can be easily understood by all users. Goal titles used in the public dashboard are indicated in Table 1 (e.g., (INVESTMENTS)). This plan also describes other ways in which Metro manages performance and uses data to make decisions, such as internal Monthly Business Review process and annual evaluation of the service networks’ performance through the System Evaluation report. Through continuous improvement as a value-driven and data-informed organization, performance measures may continue to be refined and evolve.